The dissatisfaction of giving: How generosity can often be misunderstood

One day I brought her some muffins that went unsold as I closed up at the neighbourhood cafe I was working at part-time. I imagined our exchange: She would gratefully accept my offer, crack a smile and ease her hunger with baked goods. She’d be happy. I’d be happy.

But Frances didn’t want my muffins.

“I want fish and chips,” she said, not angrily, but decisively. I was stunned by her rejection; instead of buying her those fish and chips, I walked home bewildered and kind of hurt — muffins still in hand.

Hearts swelled around the world recently as the grainy smartphone camera image of New York City police officer giving just-purchased boots to a barefoot man on a cold night in November went viral. But soon enough a more complicated story emerged.

Last week, The New York Times reported that the shoeless man, Jeffrey Hillman, was barefoot once again. And though grateful to Larry DePrimo, the officer who helped him out that night, he told the newspaper he had to hide the boots because they’re worth a lot of money. He also wondered why he wasn’t getting a “piece of the pie” from his face being everywhere. The New York Daily News later discovered that Mr. Hillman isn’t actually homeless.

With his apartment in the Bronx and a history of turning down help from family and New York City’s homeless services, public reaction towards Mr. Hillman shifted dramatically. If he’s not going to wear the boots, what’s the point? And a perhaps more cynical thought — if he has a roof over his head, could he just be trying to play people by wandering the streets barefoot?

And while Officer DePrimo may have had no expectation at all, there was some notable disappointment in the exchange — the story turning a mirror on the thousands of well-intentioned interactions that take place with the homeless every day, and how those gestures and gifts can be, at times, misunderstood.

Research on gift-giving has shown that we always want to know good will come from our gift, or else we don’t get the satisfaction from giving, says Simon Fraser University professor Lara Aknin, who very recently studied the emotional rewards from giving. She found that even very young children received more of a happiness boost if they gave to others. They got that warm glow we all seek during the holidays.

We live in a world that runs on transactions — social and monetary — and we’re not always used to putting ourselves in the shoes of someone who may not have any, said Bri Trypuc, head of donor advisory at charity watchdog Charity Intelligence Canada.

“I think we give on good intentions,” she said, noting Canadians gave $8.2-billion in taxable donations in 2010 — a figure that obviously excludes random acts of kindness like Officer DePrimo’s that aren’t tracked monetarily. But she acknowledged the gut reaction is to be surprised and even let down to hear that Mr. Hillman wasn’t using the gift the way the officer may have intended.

“It’s in our nature to see the world based in our own contexts,” she said. “The reality is that we really don’t know anything outside of our experiences, so on a daily basis we’re struggling with our biases and there’s this kind of need to understand the world as it is and not just as we wish it were.”

Kate Gibson runs the Wish drop-in centre for women who do sex work to survive life in Vancouver’s East Side. She says that while the people who use the drop-in are grateful when people give them things, they may sell them to buy something they need, pay rent or, sometimes, buy drugs. People cast moral judgments on the homeless, she said, “because the giver thinks it’s about them” — not the homeless person.

“I bet you anything that that police officer didn’t think that at all — he just saw a guy with no shoes on and gave him some boots,” she said. “Now I guess others want to judge the guy because he didn’t have the boots on. You know what? Anyone had a sweater from an aunt that they think sucks? Yeah they do. And what do they do with that? It’s the same thing. It’s just that you’ve got to decide you’re going to give it freely.”

A Salvation Army poll conducted in January 2011, found that 25% of Canadians think that poor people are lazy and have low moral values. Thirty-seven percent believed the poor still “have it pretty good.” Another Salvation Army poll found “a huge percentage of Canadians believe that people who are homeless choose to be [that way], a huge percentage think they don’t want to work,” said Stephen Gaetz, the director of the Canadian Homelessness Research Network and York University professor of education.

“Those are the kind of prejudices — the other is that they’re all drug addicts and scammers,” he said. And maybe the panhandler on the street will use your spare change to buy alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, he said, but thinking that the homeless need to have moral decisions made for them is infantilizing.

“When people are treated like they’re not adults who can make decisions, or as an adult you can’t be trusted with pocket change … that’s a little humiliating.”

When people are treated like they’re not adults who can make decisions, or as an adult you can’t be trusted with pocket change … that’s a little humiliating

Ms. Trypuc says that of course people who live on the streets use emotional cues to get people to give them money. “We give on kneejerk reactions,” she said. “Think about if you want something … emotion works, emotion sells.”

Frank Furedi, a British sociologist and professor at the University of Kent, says that whether we like it or not, there is a social contract in play in these interactions.

“There’s nothing wrong with the homeless person saying ‘I don’t want your charity,’” he said. “[But] if they say ‘piss off I don’t want your muffin,’ they can’t say I want steak. It’s quite legitimate for people to say ‘I want to make it on my own,’ but that’s not what they’re saying.”